Axon Enterprise's AI product revenue grew 700% year-over-year and subscriptions to its AI Era Plan climbed 140% between the first quarter of 2024 and the first quarter of 2025, according to a company earnings call. The numbers, disclosed alongside pitches from rivals Motorola Solutions and Flock Safety at the International Association of Chiefs of Police Technology Conference in Fort Worth, Texas this May, mark the moment AI for policing crossed from pilot budgets into standing procurement.
The AI Era Plan, launched by Axon in late 2024, is a flat annual subscription that gives police departments access to the company's current AI tools and any it ships in the future. That bundle now sits on top of a hardware and software stack Axon has spent two decades building — stun guns, body-worn cameras, license plate readers, the Draft One report-writing tool, the Axon Air drone program, and a chatbot for officers.
Axon President Joshua Isner framed the trajectory bluntly to investors, saying the company intends to become the AI company in public safety. The subscription model matters because it locks agencies in on multiyear contracts and, combined with sole-source procurement agreements, lets vendors keep selling new products without competing bids.
Key facts
- 01Axon's AI product revenue grew 700% year-over-year, according to a company earnings call transcript.
- 02AI Era Plan subscriptions rose 140% between Q1 2024 and Q1 2025 as departments bundle current and future AI tools.
- 03Axon acquired surveillance firm Fusus in early 2024 to launch Axon Fusus, its real-time crime center product.
- 04The NYPD, which first adopted RTCCs over 20 years ago, was collecting roughly two years of body camera footage every week by 2019.
- 05The IACP Technology Conference in Fort Worth, Texas showcased facial recognition, license plate readers, gunshot detection, drones, and AI report writers this May.
The centerpiece of the current sales pitch is the real-time crime center, or RTCC — software that ingests 911 calls, CCTV feeds, license plate reads, and body camera footage and hands officers a summary before they arrive on scene. The NYPD first adopted RTCCs more than 20 years ago, and by 2019 the department was collecting around two years of body camera footage every week, according to a Committee on Public Safety hearing transcript. Human analysts cannot keep up with that volume; AI is being sold as the only way to make the data usable.
Axon entered this market in early 2024 by acquiring surveillance company Fusus and rebranding the product as Axon Fusus. Motorola Solutions offers its own competing RTCC alongside its own cameras and readers. The pattern is the same across the top of the market: the same vendor sells the sensors that generate the data and the AI that decides what the data means.
Startups are trying to slot in underneath. ForceMetrics, founded in late 2020 by former FBI cybercrime agent Jason Truppi, sells a platform called Velocity that pitches itself as an AI decision-assist layer over the legacy records systems police already run. Truppi told The Verge that all the systems of record used by police departments are essentially antiquated, and that his company avoids the word predictive because earlier attempts under that label failed.
“A lot of it is sales gimmicks that don't actually deliver on what the promise is.”— Abrem Ayana, Police captain in Brookhaven, Georgia
Those earlier attempts are the reason skeptics are watching this build-out closely. CompStat and PredPol — computer comparison statistics and predictive policing — were sold in prior decades as data-driven correctives to human bias, and instead reinforced the patterns they were meant to fix. The current generation of tools is materially larger in scope: black-box models trained on much more data, embedded deeper into dispatch and report-writing workflows.
Nina Loshkajian, a fellow at the New York University Center on Race, Inequality, and the Law, argued that the current wave is not new so much as rebranded. Police captain Abrem Ayana of Brookhaven, Georgia was similarly unimpressed with the vendor pitches on offer, saying a lot of what is being sold does not deliver on the promise. In the absence of federal standards for police AI, departments largely have to trust vendor marketing about accuracy and safety.
“These algorithmic systems did not prevent violent encounters between police and civilians then, and we shouldn't be tricked into thinking they'll make a meaningful difference in the future.”— Nina Loshkajian, Fellow at the NYU Center on Race, Inequality, and the Law
The competitive structure is starting to look like the cloud market in miniature: two or three integrated majors and a long tail of specialists trying to sell into gaps. Axon and Motorola both own the data-collection layer and the analysis layer. Flock Safety dominates automated license plate reading in many jurisdictions. Report-writing tools like Draft One are moving generative AI directly into the legal record, since a police report is a legal document that gets used in charging decisions and at trial.
The counterweight is real. Federal oversight of police AI does not exist in a meaningful form, industry benchmarks are absent, and the models being deployed are not the frontier systems used by researchers — they are commercial products tuned for a specific vendor's revenue model. Loshkajian's critique that predictive systems did not prevent violent encounters in the prior decade is a factual claim, not a rhetorical one, and it applies with more force to systems that now also draft the paperwork.
For AI vendors, policing is one of the largest single-buyer markets in the United States after defense and healthcare, and the Axon numbers show what happens when a bundled subscription hits it at scale. A 700% jump in AI revenue and a 140% jump in Era Plan subscriptions in twelve months is the shape of a category being locked down by an incumbent while regulators are still deciding whether to write rules. Whichever vendor owns the RTCC layer three years from now will effectively own the decision tier of American policing — and right now, that race has two serious contestants and a shrinking window for anyone else to catch up.
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